Artists

Sundaram, Vivan

Wound, 2013
Courtesy: Vivan Sundaram

Vivan Sundaram’s (b. 1943) multimedia and highly intertextual oeuvre is characterized by an abundance of forms, materials, and multi-layered art-historical references. Early on, he broke with artistic conventions to find his own, unique formal language in the incorporation of diverse materials. A self-described critical witness of his times, his political views are closely entwined with his sculptural practice; his work navigates the field of tension between aesthetic being and social consciousness.
Sundaram, one of the first Indian artists to work with installation, has continuously referenced social issues, problems of perception, memory, popular culture, and history in an array of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and video art. His creative process has long been marked by the principle of bricolage, an aspect reflected in Gagawaka: Making Strange (2011–2012) as well. Using such misappropriated and recycled materials as women’s handbags, paper cups, and truck tires, Sundaram creates ostensibly wearable sculptural garments and integrates them into a virtuosic performance involving mannequins. Postmortem (2013) finds the artist assembling fragmentary pieces of anatomical models, tailor’s dummies, and wooden props to create haunting objects and sculptures.
They are intimate, vulnerable glimpses into the human condition, moments of transience and simultaneous processes of transformation. A picture of the times we live in, the works raise questions about illness, sexuality, and aging. We find depictions of the human body - which in this case are strongly based on the Western body type - that are simultaneously disposable objects, rejects from fashion studios, modeled after certain art derived typologies. In that sense, the notion of the standardization of bodies is a key feature of both works. On a contemporary level, Postmortem raises questions about the artist’s earlier works and can be seen as a kind of continuation of Gagawaka. The latter featured among other venues at Haus der Kunst in Munich, where Sundaram was the subject of a major retrospective curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Text: Gloria Aino Grzywatz; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Vivan Sundaram’s (b. 1943) multimedia and highly intertextual oeuvre is characterized by an abundance of forms, materials, and multi-layered art-historical references. Early on, he broke with artistic conventions to find his own, unique formal language in the incorporation of diverse materials. A self-described critical witness of his times, his political views are closely entwined with his sculptural practice; his work navigates the field of tension between aesthetic being and social consciousness.
Sundaram, one of the first Indian artists to work with installation, has continuously referenced social issues, problems of perception, memory, popular culture, and history in an array of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and video art. His creative process has long been marked by the principle of bricolage, an aspect reflected in Gagawaka: Making Strange (2011–2012) as well. Using such misappropriated and recycled materials as women’s handbags, paper cups, and truck tires, Sundaram creates ostensibly wearable sculptural garments and integrates them into a virtuosic performance involving mannequins. Postmortem (2013) finds the artist assembling fragmentary pieces of anatomical models, tailor’s dummies, and wooden props to create haunting objects and sculptures.
They are intimate, vulnerable glimpses into the human condition, moments of transience and simultaneous processes of transformation. A picture of the times we live in, the works raise questions about illness, sexuality, and aging. We find depictions of the human body - which in this case are strongly based on the Western body type - that are simultaneously disposable objects, rejects from fashion studios, modeled after certain art derived typologies. In that sense, the notion of the standardization of bodies is a key feature of both works. On a contemporary level, Postmortem raises questions about the artist’s earlier works and can be seen as a kind of continuation of Gagawaka. The latter featured among other venues at Haus der Kunst in Munich, where Sundaram was the subject of a major retrospective curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Text: Gloria Aino Grzywatz; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Wound, 2013
Courtesy: Vivan Sundaram